“I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I’ve had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.”

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you… they’re a little away from you.

I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.

Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.

The wild stuff is all so overrated. Drinking, you don’t feel good all the time. There’s a lot of down, a lot of misery.

I hate to be fatalistic about it, but alcoholism, it’s just in your genes. We had some of it in my family, and it just got me.

Time is what makes good stories. Much has been cooking for a long time, and at last finds an out in narration one day. That’s a supreme joy. And why the characters keep showing up.

A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don’t like the wispy and the vague… or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I’m impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I’ve done have come to me by instinct.

My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.

I never pulled a loaded pistol on anybody, but it got around that I did. It got turned into lore. It’s a myth. There’s so much bad gun stuff.

You’ve got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.

The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think better. You’re braver, and you’ll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it’d be beautiful. The trouble was I couldn’t.

Literature is the history of the soul.

Appreciate your flaws to reach the potential of your greatness.

I wish I didn’t have any flaws! I think everybody is flawed.

But if you don’t love my every flaw, then you mustn’t love me- not at all.

Perfection in imperfection. Someone whose flaws work well with yours.

Beauty is perfect in its imperfections, so you just have to go with the imperfections.

Perfectly imperfect flawed and irreplaceably you.

It is not your fault for falling in love with the wrong person. It is easy to mistake familiarity for love, if the love you received as a child was flawed.

We’re all flawed human beings and we all have a cauldron of psychosis which we have to unravel as we grow older and find the way we fit in to live our lives as best as possible.